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The Spirit of the FCIL-SIS Award is presented each year to members whose work furthers our mission, serves the entire FCIL-SIS, and inspires other to act. This year during the AALL 2017 Annual Meeting, Yemisi Dina and Thomas Mills received Spirit of the FCIL-SIS Awards.

Yemisi Dinais an Associate Librarian and Head of Public Services at Osgoode Hall Law School Library in Toronto, Canada. Yemisi currently serves as Chair of the African Law Interest Group and was responsible for proposing, coordinating, and moderating the FCIL-SIS sponsored program at this year’s Annual Meeting: Global Energy Law: Perspectives from North America and Africa. Yemisi has published two research guides on the Globalex platform: one on Nigerian law and one on Caribbean law , based on her prior experience as a librarian in both Nigeria and the Bahamas. Additionally, Yemisi developed a project that digitizes and summarizes customary court decisions from Ibadan and Abeokuta, two major cities in South Western Nigeria. These court decisions are not published in an official record, so Yemisi’s summaries provide one of the few means of access. As many members may remember, Yemisi shared the results of her project at the jurisdictions IG joint meeting held during last year’s Annual Meeting in Chicago. Thank you, Yemisi! Congratulations!

Thomas Mills, now the Director of the University of Notre Dame Law School Library, served with a team of consultants for the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in the summer of 2009, providing advice on how to archive materials on the genocide trials. He has also served as Chair of the FCIL-SIS Strategic Planning Committee; Chair of the FCIL-SIS Pre-Conference Summit Task Force; a member of the Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals committee; and a member of the indexing of periodical literature committee. More recently he has worked as a member of the project team of Global Online Access to Legal Information(GOALI). Congratulations, Thomas!

The Guide was most recently published in March of 2016 in Volume 35, Issue 1, of the Legal Reference Services Quarterly. Itcovers all types of primary sources of law and secondary legal literature, including international agreements, state gazettes, law journals, textbooks, and monographs. Additionally, it filled a gap in the literature: it contains an extensive bibliography of secondary literature in English on Mexican law and legal research, which is not found in other research guides or treatises on Mexican law and legal research. Since its publication, it has received approximately 500 views (on the Taylor & Francis platform that hosts Legal Reference Services Quarterly) and over 200 SSRN downloads.

The Guide is a significant contribution to our field in terms of its content, but it is also a fantastic example of the quality of work we can achieve when we collaborate with each other for the benefit of our profession. Congratulations to all!

Each year, we honor an FCIL-SIS member who has made outstanding contributions to the Section in any number of the following areas: outstanding leadership in the Section, at meetings, and through committee work; special and notable service to the Section; participation in Section educational programs and public-speaking activities; mentoring activities that inspire others in the Section; and activities that encourage others to join the section. This year, our colleague, Sergio Stone won the Daniel L. Wade FCIL-SIS Outstanding Service Award.